Hosni Mubarak
Former air force pilot who stood down as President of Egypt after 30 years in the wake of the Arab Spring
HOSNI Mubarak, who died last Tuesday aged 91, ruled Egypt for three decades until being forced from power in February 2011 during the so-called “Arab Spring” that engulfed much of North Africa and the Middle East.
Mubarak’s elevation to the top job had been sudden and dramatic. On October 6, 1981 he was at the side of the then president, Anwar Sadat, at a military parade in Cairo to celebrate the success of Operation Badr in 1973, when the Egyptian Army had crossed the Suez Canal to recover part of the Sinai peninsula from Israel at the start of the Yom Kippur War.
Although security was tight, one of the military vehicles contained a group of Islamic fundamentalists who leapt out of their truck and attacked Sadat and his entourage with grenades and AK-47 assault rifles. The president and 10 others were killed. A further 28 were wounded, among them Mubarak, who took a bullet to the left hand.
Within 24 hours Mubarak — who had served as vice-president since 1975 — had been approved by Egypt’s parliament as Sadat’s successor. Six days later he consolidated his position in an unopposed election, and he was sworn in on October 14.
In his inaugural address he promised to honour the Camp David accords, which had been signed by Sadat and the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in 1978, and had established full diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel and ensured the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai peninsula.
One of the effects of the agreement was to isolate Egypt in much of the Arab world, but Mubarak continued to see his nation’s most important international relationship as that with the US, which was pumping more than $2bn (€1.8bn) a year into the Egyptian economy as an incentive to pursue peace with Israel.
For his part, Mubarak encouraged the Americans to put pressure on the Israelis to engage with the Palestinians, and in May 1989 Egypt was able to rejoin the Arab League.
In 2003 Egypt hosted the summit at Sharm El Sheikh — attended by President George W Bush, the Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas and several Arab leaders — at which key Arab nations gave their formal backing to the socalled “road map” for peace.
Mubarak’s efforts to walk this tightrope on the international stage were not universally welcomed at home, where he showed himself ready to deal ruthlessly with opposition.
After Sadat’s assassination he jailed more than 2,500 people, most of them Islamic fundamentalists, but also Coptic church leaders, politicians and journalists. Throughout his time in office he kept the country under emergency law, giving the state sweeping powers of arrest.
Of particular concern were the periodic terrorist attacks aimed at Egypt’s lucrative tourism industry. Mubarak himself was to survive an estimated eight assassination attempts, including one when his limousine was showered with bullets as he attended an African summit meeting in Addis Ababa in 1995.
His regime was particularly intolerant of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been founded in 1928 and dissolved by President Nasser in 1954.
The Brotherhood, an illegal body, sought to work within the existing political system to make Egypt a strict Islamic state based on Sharia law, and in January 1995 Mubarak accused it of acting as the civilian wing of militant Islamist groups. In the elections in 2000 it emerged as the largest opposition group in the Egyptian parliament, securing 17 seats.
Mubarak hoped to promote stability by encouraging the production of basic goods and finding new export markets, and by attracting investment and economic aid from abroad. As a signal that he wished to narrow the gap between rich and poor, in his early years in power he demolished dozens of luxury weekend apartments, including a state-owned villa near the pyramids that had been used by Sadat. Mubarak affected to live modestly in a two-storey house in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis.
He imposed a military-style discipline on his administration, insisting that politicians be clocked in and out of parliamentary sessions and fining those unable to satisfactorily explain their absence. In January 1982 he dismissed his entire cabinet after a number of his ministers were involved in a corruption scandal. He worked a 16-hour day himself and kept fit by playing hockey and squash.
The suppression of domestic opposition saw Mubarak win 97pc of the popular vote in the 1987 election and 96pc in 1993. As the years passed, however, Egypt’s most powerful ally, the US, began to apply pressure on him to burnish his democratic credentials, and in the 2005 poll rival candidates were allowed to stand; Mubarak still managed to secure 88pc of the vote.
At the same time there was irritation that unlike his predecessors he had consistently refused to name a vice-president, and therefore a successor, which would have allayed concerns about the regime’s future stability.
In September 2002 Mubarak named one of his sons, Gamal, as head of the National Democratic Party, fuelling speculation that Gamal was being groomed to take over.
By early 2011 the unrest of the Arab Spring had spread to Egypt. There were mass protests in Cairo and other Egyptian cities, and Mubarak was forced to announce that he would not contest the presidential election scheduled for that September. He also promised constitutional reform. But the protests intensified, and on February 11 Mubarak resigned, power being transferred to the Armed Forces Supreme Council.
Within weeks he was under arrest, and in May it was announced that he and his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, would stand trial over the deaths of anti-government protesters. It was the start of a legal process which would last six years, during which the former president (allegedly in ill health) frequently appeared in court on an upright stretcher and peering from behind a pair of sunglasses.
Throughout the process, Mubarak protested his innocence; but in June 2012 he was found guilty of complicity in the murder of some of the demonstrators in early 2011, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He appealed, and seven months later was granted a retrial.
At the same time, he and his sons were ordered to be retried on corruption charges on which they had earlier been acquitted. It was reported that the Swiss had frozen $340m (€311m) in bank accounts belonging to the Mubarak family. Their lawyer insisted that the money was acquired outside Egypt, when Mubarak’s sons worked abroad.
In May 2014 Mubarak was found guilty of embezzlement, and sentenced to three years’ jail; his sons received four years each. In November that year, Mubarak was acquitted in a retrial of conspiring to kill demonstrators in the 2011 uprising. His acquittal was upheld by Egypt’s highest appeals court in March 2017, and he was free to return home from the Cairo military hospital at which he had been held for six years.
Mohamed Hosni Mubarak was born on May 4, 1928, one of five children of a Ministry of Justice inspector, and educated near his home village of Kafr El-Meselha in the Nile Delta province of Monufia. At the national Military Academy he completed his training in two years instead of the usual three, and then spent two years at the Air Force Academy.
He also had advanced training in the Soviet Union, and in 1964-65 spent a year at the elite Frunze General Staff Academy in central Asia. As a pilot he flew the Soviet Tupolev Tu-16 jet fighter.
In 1967 Mubarak was appointed commander of the Air Force Academy. It is said that when he had been an instructor there, President Nasser’s brother Husain had arrived as a cadet trying to use his family connections to avoid paying the registration fee; Mubarak sent him home. “I hate people who exploit the fact that anybody in their family is important,” he once remarked.
After serving as Air Force Chief of Staff from 1969, Mubarak was appointed commander-in-chief and deputy minister of war in 1972. The air force was both ill-equipped and undermanned when he took over, having been cut to pieces by the Israelis in the 1967 Six-Day War. It was to avenge that defeat that Sadat planned the attack in 1973 against Israeli soldiers stationed on the Sinai peninsula since 1967.
He ordered Mubarak to lead the offensive. Mubarak knew that his MiGs were no match for the Israelis’ Phantom and Mirage jets, but he rounded up every available aircraft. Even unarmed trainers were equipped with cannons and rockets.
On October 6, 1973 some 300 Egyptian bombers and fighters carried out the first strike, destroying most of their targets within half an hour. As a result the Egyptian infantry sustained few casualties when they attacked the Israeli positions. Sadat hailed it as “an epic feat, heroic and glorious”. A ceasefire was brokered by the UN in late October.
As Sadat’s vice-president from 1975, Mubarak was responsible for the day-to-day business of government, leaving Sadat free to concentrate on foreign affairs. He presided over weekly cabinet meetings and oversaw the country’s intelligence agency, arms procurement and nuclear energy programme.
In 1980 he was elected vice-chairman of the National Democratic Party, a role that secured his position as Sadat’s successor.
Hosni Mubarak married, in 1958, Suzanne Thabet, the daughter of an Egyptian doctor and a Welsh nurse.
Their two sons were freed in October 2015, a judge stating that they had served adequate jail time on charges of corruption and embezzlement of public funds.
In 2018 they were arrested again on charges of stock market manipulation but acquitted three days before their father’s death.
‘I hate people who exploit the fact that anybody in their family is important’